“So I have. Excuse me, I was thinking of something else.... If you only knew what has happened to me!”
His eyes were sparkling; he looked on the verge of jumping out of his skin.
“Oh, please!” entreated Fleurissoire, “talk about that afterwards; tell me first of all about your visit. I’m so impatient to hear....”
“Does it interest you?”
“You’ll soon know how much. Go on, go on, I beg you.”
“Well, then,” began Julius, seizing hold of Fleurissoire by one arm and dragging him away from the neighbourhood of St. Peter’s, “perhaps you may have heard in what miserable poverty our poor brother Anthime has been living as a result of his conversion. He is still waiting in vain for what the Church promised to give him in order to make up for the loss inflicted on him by the freemasons. Anthime has been duped; so much must be admitted. I don’t know, my dear fellow, how this affair strikes you—as for me, I consider it an absolute farce ... but it’s thanks to it perhaps that I’m more or less clear as to the matter in hand, about which I’m most anxious to talk to you. Well, then—a creature of inconsequence! That’s going rather far perhaps ... and no doubt his apparent inconsequence hides what is, in reality, a subtler and more recondite sequence—the important point is that what makes him act should not be a matter of interest, or, as the usual phrase is, that he should not be merely actuated by interested motives.”
“I don’t follow you very well,” said Amédée.
“True, true! I was straying from the subject of my visit. Well, then, I had determined to take Anthime’s business in hand.... Ah, my dear fellow, if you’d seen the apartment in which he’s living in Milan! ‘You can’t possibly stay on here,’ I said to him at once. And when I think of that unfortunate Veronica! But he’s going in for asceticism—turning into a regular saint; he won’t allow anyone to pity him—and as for blaming the clergy! ‘My dear friend,’ I said to him, ‘I grant you that the higher clergy are not to blame, but it can only be because they know nothing about it. You must let me go and tell them how matters stand.’”
“I thought that Cardinal Pazzi....” suggested Fleurissoire.
“Yes, but it wasn’t any good. You see, these high dignitaries are all afraid of compromising themselves. It was necessary for someone who was quite an outsider to take the matter up. Myself, for instance. For just see in what a wonderful way discoveries are made!—I mean, the most important ones; the thing seems like a sudden illumination—but not at all—in reality one hasn’t ceased thinking of it. So with me; for a long time past I had been worrying over my characters—their excessive logic, and at the same time their insufficient definition.”